


A Far Distant

by Kirby_Crow



Category: Carnivale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 22:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3744961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirby_Crow/pseuds/Kirby_Crow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The difference between sight and seeing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Far Distant

The landscape is endless sand and scrub crowned by a sun of streaked brass that seems to shimmer on the horizon for hours, staring Jones down like a bad debt. 

Even the dust in his teeth tastes sterile and lifeless. Beside him, Ben is quietly alive. He sleeps in the worst heat of the day, lulled by exhaustion, the rocking motion of the Ford, the washboard road beneath them, and undoubtedly by - he hesitates to think about it, even though he's never stopped thinking about it - the Angels whispering in his ear, watching over him, miracles in the skin. 

The Ford abruptly sputters to a halt, steam hissing and the metal hood pinging like pop-gun caps in the late afternoon. The painted sun consents to fall at last, and the wind is stale and tastes of dirt. Ben is still asleep, sitting up with his head turned to the side, his cheek pressed moistly to stained leather. 

Jones gets out and pops the hood, grabs the dented metal can from the back and fills the radiator with brackish pond water they picked up fifty miles back. He finds himself peeking around the raised hood, through the dust-caked windshield.

Ben murmurs in his sleep, wincing as something unseen chases him to waking. Jones wonders if the thing chasing him is terrible or holy or both, if Ben can see it coming quickly or if he has to stand and wait for it to cross a red, tortured plain to reach him, and all the while Ben's feet are mired in cement. He's a pawn. He's bound and paid for, and what's worse is that he seems to know it; fatalism burned into every line of his skin. 

Jones walks back around to the driver's side, fishes the scout canteen out from under the seat and has a drink while he stands there and waits. Ben murmurs. It sounds like torment, and it takes all of Jones's strength not to lunge over the seat and shake him awake, shake the nightmare off him and chase the haunting thing back where it came from. Finally, Ben is still. Whatever was hounding him has left. The sound of Ben's even breath seems to halt the gusting wind, and Jones is struck with a sudden, frightening sense of standing outside of himself. 

Slinging the canteen strap over his shoulder, Jones closes the hood and walks over to the passenger side, the soles of his cracked leather shoes sending up puffs of fine dust around his ankles. Ben's eyelashes are dark and long, and his face is in shadow. 

Jones reaches out to him, looking at his hand in mild disbelief as it is drawn to Ben's face like magnet. 

He jerks back quickly, surprised to feel stubble there, as if flesh were an alien quality, and he wonders when he stopped thinking of Ben that way. For a man with so much of his soul firmly staked in another world, Ben has always been disturbingly _here._ This change is sudden. He tries to catch up with it, but it's happened too quickly and he can only grasp the rag end of it before he fails. 

For a moment, he's not sure of anything anymore. He feels like the weight of the world is perched on thin glass. 

Ben wakes smoothly and looks at him, squinting as Jones shifts aside and the sun strikes him full in face. Jones thoughtfully steps back again to block the light, but he can't see what Ben sees: the sun-halo surrounding his shadowed visage, turning him into a large and faceless stranger lurking over him. 

For a moment, Ben looks unsure and alarmed. "Jonesy?"

"Yeah. It's me."

Ben sighs in relief. Jones watches him sit up and knuckle his eyes like a sleepy kid. Ben sniffs and coughs, stretching his thin arms above his head. "I was dreaming."

"I know." He meets Ben's look. "You do that a lot. Always have."

Something of what he feels must show in his voice. Ben looks uncomfortable. He says it angrily: "I told ya, I ain't no saint." 

"But you ain't a man. You're something else."

"Hey, damnit…"

"You know what I mean."

Ben is silent for a long moment. He smiles suddenly with grim humor and shakes his head. "Yeah. I guess I do."

Ben's grimy cotton shirt is sticking to him like wet paper and his lips are so dry they're almost translucent. He licks them and catches Jones's eyes following the flick of tongue. For Ben's part, he's not too surprised. He's seen lusts of much darker nature in the minds of men. In comparison, the thing that Jones fights not to feel pales to innocence. He's not even sure it's a sin, whatever the preachers say. 

As for Jones, he feels uncovered, naked, knowing that Ben is aware of everything and probably always has been. He feels a quick flush of shame and looks away, as if his eyes have the power to sully what he sees in Ben, that shining thing that he can't name virtue because it's too weak and he can't name holy because it's too false. Ben is neither. 

Jones mutely offers him the battered canteen. 

Ben gives him a grateful nod and drinks. "Wish you wouldn't do that," Ben says lowly, screwing the tin cap down and slapping it. He watches his own hands, his head bowed. "Starin' at me, thinkin' what you're thinkin'."

Jones shakes his head, glaring at the flat rim of the desert to the south. "I wish I wasn't thinkin' it either." He clears his mouth and spits, surprised to feel his flesh gone parched already. He offers it like an excuse: "I love Lib, you know."

Ben's head jerks up. "I know," he blurts. "It's… that's what makes it…" he falters. "What you're feeling… it ain't mine to take, however much you want to give it. It don't belong to me."

"So you don't get to claim nothing for yourself? Not even this?" Jones's voice cracks as he strives for calm. He's deeply offended in a way that he hasn't felt since the Mob tried to muscle him up to throwing a game. "That ain't right. It just ain't fair."

The corners of Ben's mouth turn up in a petite smile that radiates a heat of its own, a slow burn that telegraphs volumes of both self-hate and self-amusement, and Jones wonders what Ben has ever done to hate himself for. 

"I was born, for one," Ben answers, seeing right into him. 

"That's a lie."

"It ain't," Ben insists coldly. "I don't lie. Look." He means it literally. " _Look_ at me, Jones." 

But Jones shifts on his feet and a beam of sunlight rails over his shoulder into Ben's eyes. Ben pupils contract to points of black, and Jones inhales, shaken to the marrow, and he sees what Ben wants him to see. 

He's not acquainted with this vision; can't recognize it at first. Then it flows over him like the garish sunset that's breaking over the mountain behind him. His breath freezes, and he has to blink hard and bite his lip bloody not to shout out what he sees, to cry it to Heaven or the sky or even the rocks if they'll listen, and he's sure, in that moment, that he's not the first disciple to suffer the need to kneel as keenly as the need to rut. Jonesy would go down on his ertswhile bad knee for Ben at this point, would rub his rough cheek against sweat-stained denim and open his hard-lipped mouth and teach Ben the meaning of worship. 

His fingers grip the metal window frame of the truck and he breathes and concentrates on that: the thin line of warm glass under his skin, the smooth curve of welded iron, a pit of scaly rust near his thumb. 

He reaches out to Ben, fingers curled away from him as if in penitence, and he skirts any contact with clothing or flesh as he takes the canteen from hands as hard-callused and grimed as his own. 

Ben allows the doorway of his gaze to fall closed. "I'm not an Angel," he says. He's said it before. 

Jones nods, wordless. He walks around the truck, takes his seat behind the wheel again and coaxes the engine to life. After a while, the sound of the road fills up the silences between them. 

He thinks about what he's seen as the stars flare to life one by one and Ben again slips effortlessly into sleep, like a swimmer into deep water. He wonders if Ben is more at home there than here, where flesh is such a barrier. 

He marvels at how much it was like his first sight of the sea, or -not so long ago- death's door creaking open for him: a far distant horizon without an approach. Not that he wants to draw near to that shore. Not yet, anyway. 

It's blessing enough just to see.

**Author's Note:**

> *2007


End file.
